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PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser returns gibberish

$html = file_get_html('http://www.livelifedrive.com/');  
echo $html->plaintext;

I've no problem scraping other websites but this particular one returns gibberish.
Is it encrypted or something?

Solution

  • Actually, the gibberish you see is a GZIPed content.

    When I fetch the content with hurl.it for instance, here are the headers returned by server:

    GET http://www.livelifedrive.com/malaysia/ (the url http://www.livelifedrive.com/ resolves to http://www.livelifedrive.com/malaysia/)

Connection: keep-alive
Content-Encoding: gzip  <--- The content is gzipped
Content-Length: 18202
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 10:35:42 GMT
P3p: CP="NOI ADM DEV PSAi COM NAV OUR OTRo STP IND DEM"
Server: nginx/1.4.2
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.17

    So once you have scraped the content, unzip it. Here is a sample code:

    if ( ! function_exists('gzdecode'))
{
    /**
     * Decode gz coded data
     * 
     * http://php.net/manual/en/function.gzdecode.php
     * 
     * Alternative: http://digitalpbk.com/php/file_get_contents-garbled-gzip-encoding-website-scraping
     * 
     * @param string $data gzencoded data
     * @return string inflated data
     */
    function gzdecode($data) 
    {
        // strip header and footer and inflate

        return gzinflate(substr($data, 10, -8));
    }
}

    References: